from:

All the Web's a Stage

Libraries account for $1.3 billion of Canada's Gross Domestic Product.

The Conference Board of Canada released the report "Valuing Culture: Measuring and Understanding Canada's Creative Economy". In total, culture accounts for more than $43 billion or 3.8% of Canada's GDP.

Subscription Req'd to access the report.

Take a look at TextALibrarian.com. This was created by a small start-up mobile Q&A service called Mosio. They won the Mobile Category at SXSW this year. They have a number of beta library customers including Yale, UC Berkeley, University of Kansas, and UC Merced among others. There is a demo on the website that you can try to see how it works, including both sides of the conversation (basically you get to text in a question, and answer it yourself through the web interface).

Here's a list of the primary execution challenges, based on surveys of organizational leaders:


1. Inability to manage change effectively or overcome internal resistance to change.
2. Strategy conflicts with the existing organizational structure.
3. Poor or inadequate information sharing among individuals or business units responsible for strategy execution.
4. Unclear communication of responsibility and/or accountability for execution decisions or actions.
5. Employees' lack of feeling of ownership of a strategy or execution plan.
6. Lack of guidelines or a model to guide strategy execution.
7. Lack of understanding of the role of organizational structure and design in the execution process.
8. Inability to generate buy-in or agreement on critical execution steps or actions.
9. Lack of incentives or inappropriate incentives to support execution objectives.

From Be Excellent

I'll be thinking about these...

Read about it here.

From Library Bytes:

1. Request a formal written proposal.
2. Send the proposal to a committee.
3. Schedule meetings to discuss the concept.
4. Lose the proposal.
5. No money in the budget.
6. "Have you talked to ... about it?"
7. "We don't, haven't, won't, can't ..."
8. "Sounds exciting, but I'll need more details."
9. "Yes, but ..."
10. Quote Nancy Reagan and "just say no."

Here's a scary chart from the National Newspaper Association:

Google’s Book Search Project has now expanded to include print magazines. Google offers titles such as New York magazine, Men’s Health, Popular Science and others. Digitized past issues and present full articles can be found via keyword searching.

Read about it in Duke Magazine.

Here is a guy who has photographed 11 000 Manhattan street corners. I hope he mashes it up with Google Maps. I wonder if all big cities did this for their downtowns, how cool would that be for tourists? or would they just explore online instead of coming?

a different take on Google street View, competition from the "crowds"?


Stephen Abram/Google Street View Coverage Map

Library For Hire: Johns Hopkins U. Sells Services to an Online College

Chronicle of Higher Education